51 Ferrante, Frantumaglia, p. 116.
52 Ibid., p. 98.
53 Ibid., p. 223.
54 Lucy Jones, ‘As she is born, part of me is dying’, Guardian, 9 January 2017.
55 Ferrante, Story of a New Name, p. 372.
56 Ferrante, Lost Daughter, p. 125.
57 Ferrante, Frantumaglia, p. 222.
58 Ibid., p. 193.
59 Ibid., p. 99.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend, p. 229.
63 Ferrante, Frantumaglia, p. 239.
64 Ibid., p. 100.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid., p. 176, Story of the Lost Child, p. 175.
68 Ferrante, Story of a New Name, p. 289.
69 Ibid.
70 Ferrante, Story of the Lost Child, p. 466.
71 Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend, p. 231.
72 William Maxwell, They Came Like Swallows, 1937, London: Vintage, 2008, p. 10.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid., p. 11, pp. 31–2.
75 Ferrante, Frantumaglia, p. 146.
76 Ibid., p. 367.
77 Ibid., p. 147.
78 Ferrante, Story of the Lost Child, p. 309.
79 Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, p. 290.
80 Ibid., p. 291 (emphasis original).
81 Ibid.
82 Ferrante, Frantumaglia, p. 368 (emphasis original).
83 Ibid., p. 54.
84 Ibid., p. 220.
85 Ibid., p. 66.
86 Ibid., p. 90.
87 Ibid., p. 92.
88 Ibid., p. 201.
89 Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, p. 28.
90 Ferrante, Frantumaglia, p. 336.
91 Ibid., p. 217.
92 Ibid., p. 368.
93 Ibid., p. 268, p. 326.
94 Ibid.
95 Ibid., p. 301, p. 286.
96 Ibid., p. 126.
97 Ibid., pp. 126–7.
98 Ferrante, Days of Abandonment, p. 127.
99 Ibid., p. 224.
100 Ferrante, Frantumaglia, p. 347, p. 350.
THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY: INSIDE OUT
1 Sylvia Plath, ‘Morning Song’, in Ariel (London: Faber, 1965).
2 Marjorie Perloff, ‘The Two Ariels: The (Re)making of the Sylvia Plath Canon’, American Poetry Review, November–December 1984.
3 Danuta Kean, ‘Plath accused Hughes of beating her and wanting her dead, trove of letters shows’, Guardian, 11 April 2017.
4 Darian Leader, Strictly Bipolar (London: Penguin, 2013).
5 Fiona Shaw, Out of Me: The Story of a Postnatal Breakdown (London: Penguin, 1997).
6 Lou-Marie Kruger, Kirsten van Straaten, Laura Taylor, Marleen Lourens and Carla Dukas, ‘The Melancholy of Murderous Mothers: Depression and the Medicalization of Women’s Anger’, Feminism and Psychology, published online, 30 June 2014, p. 8. My thanks to Lou-Marie Kruger for bringing this work to my attention.
7 Ibid.
8 Virginia Woolf, The Years, 1937 (Oxford: OUP, 1992), p. 359 (emphasis mine).
9 Linda Kerber, ‘The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment – An American Perspective’, American Quarterly, 28:2, 1976, cited in Shaul Bar-Haim, The Maternalizing Movement: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood and the British Welfare State c. 1920–1950, unpublished PhD thesis, Birkbeck 2015, p. 18.
10 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Disillusionment of the War’, in Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, 1915, Standard Edn, vol.14 (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 276; The Future of an Illusion, Standard Edn, vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), p. 20.
11 Freud, The Future of an Illusion, p. 12.
12 My thanks to Miranda Carter for alerting me to this series, and to Margaret and Lucy Reynolds for the occasion we watched it together.
13 Buchi Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood (Oxford: Heinemann, 1979).
14 For a sustained, political critique of the concept of happiness, see Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
15 Simon de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième sexe, folio II, p. 385 (trans. p. 537).
16 Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa, 2016), p. 100.
17 Susan Stryker, ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1:3, 1994.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Sindiwe Magona, Mother to Mother (Claremont: David Philip, and Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), p. 127.
22 Ibid., p. 2.
23 Ibid., p. 210.
24 Ibid., p. 185.
25 Ibid., p. 201.
26 Ibid., p. 198.
27 Amy Biehl’s parents, Linda and Peter Biehl, befriended the man convicted of her murder, after he was released from prison, and two other men who were in the crowd, employing them at the charitable foundation they established in her memory. For one version of this story see Justine van der Leun, We Are Not Such Things: A Murder in a South African Township and the Search for Truth and Reconciliation (London: 4th Estate, 2016). See also Gillian Slovo’s critique of the book, ‘The Politics of Forgiveness’, Literary Review, 445, August 2016.
INDEX
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
Abbreviated Life, An (Leve)
abortion: and funding; and Gorsuch; and Roe v. Wade; and Trump
adoption; author’s experience of; and family secrets; and inverse pregnancy
Aeneid (Virgil)
Aeschylus
Africa, and depiction of mothers
Age of Innocence (Wharton)
Aguilar, Grace
Alternamoms
Alzheimer’s
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
Another World: Losing our Children to Islamic State (Slovo)
antenatal clinics
Antigone (Sophocles)
Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare)
apartheid
Ara Pacis
Are You My Mother? (Bechdel)
Arendt, Hannah
‘Ariel’ (Plath)
Ariel (Plath)
Assad, Bashar al-
Athena
attachment parenting
Attila the Hun
Augustus, Emperor
Ayelabola, Bimbo
Badinter, Elisabeth
Baird, Zoë
Balint, Michael
Baraitser, Lisa
Bataclan
Beard, Mary
Bechdel, Alison
Beckham, Victoria
Bee Sequence (of Plath poems)
Bell, Sean
Bell, Valerie
Beloved (Morrison)
Benn, Melissa
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo
Bettelheim, Bruno
Biehl, Amy
Bion, W. R.
Black Lives Matter
Blair, Tony
Bord de mer (Olmi)
Bowlby, Rachel
breast, as symbol of mother love
breastfeeding; low UK rate of; in public; rise in US rate of; and erotic pleasure; in McNish video; complexity of; and Love’s lyric; counternarrative on joys of
Brecht, Bertolt
Brexit; and NHS; and border policing
Bromberg
Brussels, attack on
Caesar, Julius
&nbs
p; Calais Jungle; and missing mothers; asylum seekers buried at; closure of; see also migration crisis; refugees
Cambridge, Duchess of
Cameron, David
Carr, Gwen
Catholic Church, apology from
Cazeneuve, Bernard
Charlie Hebdo
Chełmno extermination camp
childbirth: and ‘health tourism’; and mother’s death; and war; interest in sex lost after; and baby’s character; and trans person; see also mothers; pregnancy
Citizens Advice
Cleopatra, Queen
Clift, Montgomery
cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)
Colley, Linda
Collins, Patricia Hill
Conflict, The: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women (Badinter)
‘Container and Contained’ (Bion)
Coriolanus (Shakespeare)
Corn King and the Spring Queen, The (Mitchison)
Cory, Judge
Croatia, and maternity pay
Cusk, Rachel
custody rights
Czech Republic, and maternity pay
da Verona, Liberale
Dahl, Roald
Daily Mail, and ‘health tourism’
Days of Abandonment, The (Ferrante)
de Beauvoir, Simone
de Jesus Ramos Hernandez, Maria
Demeter
de Milet, Thalès
‘dependency’ culture
Deutsch, Helene
Diseases of Women
Dobson, Ryan
Dobson v. Dobson
Dolce & Gabbana
Donne, John
Dowler, Maj.-Gen. Arthur Arnold Bullick
earthquakes; poor die first in
Eichenbaum, Luise
Eidinow, Esther
Electra (Sophocles)
electroconvulsive therapy
Eleusinian Mysteries
Eleusis
‘Embarrassed’ video (McNish)
Emecheta, Buchi
Equality and Human Rights Commission
Estonia, and maternity pay
Eumenides, The (Aeschylus)
Euripides
Evans, Tanya
family secrets
Featherstone, Brid
Feminine Mystique, The
feminism: on women’s bodily experiences; on mothers in the home; and Medea’s words; ‘essentialist’; and motherhood as target of critique; and banning of Welldon book; de Beauvoir as mother of; and Hughes; and image of stability represented by safe, white, middle-class homes
Ferrante, Elena; and The Days of Abandonment; and Troubling Love; and The Lost Daughter; and My Brilliant Friend; and The Story of the Lost Child; on collapse of borders; on boundaries of a patriarchal world; on dark side of pregnant body; and counternarrative on joys of breastfeeding; and Frantumaglia; and seeds of ethical life; Neapolitan Novels of, see Neapolitan Novels of Elena Ferrante
Flaubert, Gustave
France: and migration crisis; and maternity pay
Frantumaglia (Ferrante)
Freud, Sigmund; and façade of civilised living
From Here to Eternity
Fun Home (Bechdel)
Future of an Illusion, The (Freud)
Galchen, Rivka
Garner, Eric
Garner, Margaret
George, Prince
Gilmore Girls
Gingerbread
Ginn, Diana
Godard, Jean-Luc
Goff, Barbara
Gorsuch, Neil
Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald)
Green, André
Grenfell Tower
Guillimeau, Jacques
Hadid, Zaha
Haiti, and hurricanes
Hall, Edith
Haloa festival
Hamlet (Shakespeare)
‘Happy Families? History and Family Policy’ (Thane)
Harrison, Michelle
‘Hate in the Counter-Transference’ (Winnicott)
‘health tourism’
Hochman, Sandra
Homerton University Hospital
House of Mirth, The (Wharton)
House of Names (Tóibín)
Houston, and hurricanes
Hughes, Ted
Human Rights Act
Hungary, and maternity pay
Hunt, Jeremy
hurricanes
I Don’t Know Why She Bothers: Guilt-Free Motherhood for Thoroughly Modern Women (Waugh)
‘I Think That I Would Die’ (Hole/Erlandson–Love)
Icke, Robert
incest; and half-siblings
infanticide
inverse pregnancy
Ionic frieze of the Parthenon
Islamic State
Italy, and maternity pay
Je vous salue, Marie
Jones, Lucy
Joys of Motherhood, The (Emecheta)
Kaiser Medical Center, LA
Kent, Nicolas
Kerr, Deborah
Klein, Melanie
Kristeva, Julia
Kristoff, Nicholas
La Leche League (LLL)
Lancaster, Burt
Laplanche, Jean
Lawrence, Doreen
Lawrence, Stephen
Leadsom, Andrea
Lean In (Sandbergh)
Lee, Hermione
lesbianism
Leve, Ariel
Lewis, Gail
Life’s Work, A: On Becoming a Mother (Cusk)
L’Indice
Little Labours (Galchen)
Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night (Magona)
Loraux, Nicole
Lost Daughter, The (Ferrante)
Love, Courtney
‘Lt Lit, la guerre’ (Loraux)
Lysias
McNish, Hollie
McRobbie, Angela
Madame Bovary (Flaubert)
Magona, Sindiwe
Major, Judge
‘Mammy’s No. 1’ (in Calais camp)
Mark Antony
Markham, Violet
Marxism, and image of stability represented by safe, white, middle-class homes
Mary, Queen Mother
Mateen, Omar
‘maternal perversion’
Maternity Action
Maternity and Parental Leave Regulations
maternity pay
Matilda (Dahl)
Matilda the Musical
Maxwell, William
May, Theresa
Medea (Euripides); Olmi’s rewrite of; Wolf’s retelling of
Medical Women’s Federation
Merkel, Angela
Metis Women of Manitoba
migration crisis; and missing mothers
Miller, George
Miller, Maria
Mitchell, Juliet
Mitchison, Naomi
Molenbeek
MomsRising
Montefiore, Jan
Morante, Elsa
‘Morning Song’ (Plath)
Morrison, Toni
mother-and-baby hostels
Mother, The (Brecht)
Mother Courage (Brecht)
Mother Love (Badinter)
Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood (Welldon)
Mother to Mother (Magona)
motherhood in classical culture; see also Ferrante, Elena; individual titles and authors
mothers: held accountable for world’s ills; and Calais Jungle; exploited misery of; lamenting, seen as hallmark of ‘natural’ catastrophes; as target for blame; and Brecht; and ‘neo-liberal intensification of mothering’; seen as original subversives; and new junior doctors’ contract; and interrogation by abusive ex-partners in secret hearings; in separation and child-contact cases; childbearing risks taken by, and variations across race and class; and maternity pay; and motherhood’s proximity to death; in prison population; and parenting websites; and benefits; and custody rights over children; and undocumented migran
ts taking care of children; and adoption; and promotion of domestic ideal; and relationship across colours; and WW2 hostels; male colonisation of; also as lovers; and ‘primary maternal preoccupation’; and emotional link to world’s wider stage; and breast, as symbol of mother love; and hatred of baby; as set of sets; and ‘maternal perversion’; and ‘dark side’ of mothering; in social work; child abuse by; and alienation of freedom; and sense of ecstasy and fulfilment; were once daughters; and ‘strange compromise’ of motherhood; and ‘erotic vapor’ of body; and mothering manuals; adrift from wider world; ‘working’, a misnomer; and when evil seizes the hour; in South Africa study; and historical, political and social anguish; disjunction between child and; instruction to children from, in, 1950s; and ‘republican motherhood’; and daughters, improved relationship between; and daughters, richness of conversations between; and ‘joy’ as corrupt term; and breast, as symbol of mother love; see also breastfeeding; de Beauvoir’s view of, see de Beauvoir, Simone; Ferrante’s views on, see Ferrante, Elena; in ancient Greece and Rome, see motherhood in classical culture; in classical culture, see motherhood in classical culture; pregnant, see pregnancy; single, see single mothers; in slavery, see slaves/slavery; in literature, see individual titles and authors
Mother’s Day
Mothers in Mourning (Loraux)
Mothers of the Movement
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
Mother’s Recompense, The (Wharton)
Mrs Dalloway (Woolf)
My Brilliant Friend (Ferrante); see also Neapolitan Novels of Elena Ferrante
National Council for One Parent Families
National Health Service (NHS): Sun’s view of; and ‘health tourism’; and women’s asylum claims
National Institute of Arts and Letters
Mothers Page 18
